


honey, enjoy: it's getting late

by TheLucindaC



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blindness, Clothed Sex, Comfort Food, Flashbacks, Food Issues, Food Porn, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, M/M, Oral Sex, Post-Canon, Quentin Coldwater Lives, Sensory Deprivation, Supportive Eliot Waugh, Telekinesis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:27:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22035556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLucindaC/pseuds/TheLucindaC
Summary: Before everything went to shit, if someone stuck a slice of Everything Pizza in his hands, Q’d happily claim he was getting every food group in one bite and be done with it.  But a breakthrough was in there, somewhere. Eliot just had to find it. He had to. This was Quentin. They didn’t bring him back just to wallow in a tasteless hell for the rest of his life. And…shit…maybe, just fucking maybe, “being brave” could get back on the table.-Or-All of Quentin's senses go haywire when he's brought back to life. After months of getting everything down to a manageable level, Eliot decides to take big risk. He cooks his feelings on a professional level, planning a five-course meal in the hopes of doing something nice for the two of them, and to see if he and Quentin can have a second chance at another fifty years. Written for the Magicians Monthly Prompt Challenge, "Blindfold."
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 12
Kudos: 174
Collections: Magicians Monthly Prompt Challenge





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite kudos to my "sous chef" Highkingeliot, who put up with me texting at odd hours, for more than a month, about all the different dishes Eliot might make, and what went with what, and whether potatoes are better than mac and cheese when I don't like either, because I don't cook. Credit for the title goes to Hozier's "No Plan," thanks to ElectricPurple89 who so rightly said he was the patron saint of Queliot fic titles. Finally, credit for the last few sentences in chapter 2 goes to Lev Grossman, who said it better than I ever could. If you wind up hungry after this fic, I apologize for nothing.

Contrary to popular belief, being brought back from the dead did not mean all your senses worked the same way they used to. When one previously deceased Quentin Coldwater rejoined the land of the living, he was in agony. Nothing – absolutely _nothing_ – worked right.

All of it was too much. His screams brought everyone, even Margo, to tears. He begged them to just let him die. Again. And again. And again. They decided to sedate him in the end, after they managed to hold him down long enough to make sure they didn’t miss the artery. Eliot still had nightmares about that day.

Sure, things got better eventually – after a long round of drugs that kept Quentin barely conscious. They set up a gurney in a sterilized Brakebills ward, stapled thousands of soundproofing pads over the walls, put up a spell to filter the air, laid down a permanent darkness charm…and all that barely helped for the first few weeks. Even the IV drip and the tube they put in his stomach for food both struggled to keep him alive, because his body almost refused to accept the nutrients. And it was impossible to keep his temperature down, like he’d forgotten how to sweat, but any cold thing they brought near him sent chills erupting all over.

Day after endless day, he started to improve. Quentin was only able to handle things a hint at a time, and no one could predict what, or for how long. His sense of touch settled down, and they were able to get some clothes on him, layer by layer. His hearing steadied too, but in stretches. Some days, he could only manage whispers, and even sound of his own voice made him clutch his head and duck into a fetal position. On others, he could listen to Tolkien audiobooks, and even something as complex as soft meditation music Julia pulled up on her phone. But they lost progress on touch that time: anything other than the sheets on his bed left him gasping for air, saying everything was so heavy it was crushing him. Then they got to smell, and he went from nearly gagging on a whiff of the perfume Margo was wearing in the other room, to inhaling the aroma of fresh coffee like he was trying to get a contact high. But they had to readjust everything again, so he didn’t pass out from the thundering of everyone’s heartbeats, or fall off the bed from shivering so hard as his temperature plummeted.

They got him out of the ward after four months post-resurrection. Eliot was only half joking when he offered to literally float Quentin out of there, so he wouldn’t feel anything except the warm sun on his skin. Instead, they got him a pair of those sensory overload headphones, and made him drink a potion that literally blinded him while stuffing a canula up his nose so they could cart around an oxygen tank. He walked out with his head held high, at least.

Eliot prepped the apartment beforehand personally. Once Q was inside, Mother Hen Eliot was activated and even Margo couldn’t dislodge the stick up his ass. He was up at the crack of dawn to gauge where each of Q’s senses were every day, micromanaged every single little thing like it was his day job, and he didn’t sleep until Q was passed out. They got into a few nasty fights soon. There was only so much hovering Quentin could take. He also said Eliot needed to let himself off the goddamn hook and stop beating himself up over every mistake.

Of course, any discussions about “being brave” and “giving their relationship another chance” were tabled. Well, not just tabled. More like “Oh, we sent them to a…‘farm upstate’ where they’ll be happy for the rest of their days.” At the same time, neither of them could sleep without the other in the room. Otherwise, they were both insomnia’s bitches. They each suffered from night terrors, and Eliot would patrol the halls like a soldier, fiddling with the locks on the doors and windows, testing the shielding wards, and peeking his head into Quentin’s bedroom. Finally, Q wandered into Eliot’s bed at 3am one Thursday. He draped himself over Eliot like a weighted blanket, and they slept through the entire rest of the day, and the day after.

Six months post-resurrection, Quentin didn’t need the headphones or the oxygen anymore. He listened to Bohemian Rhapsody on repeat with no hiccups. Margo brought a bouquet of Fillorian wildflowers from Fen one afternoon, and he buried his nose in them right away. Then she bullied him and Eliot into taking a walk outside that night, just a quick portal to Central Park to bypass all the traffic. And though they had to lead him by the hand, step by step, blind as a bat, Q actually smiled that day, for the first time since he’d come back.

It’s just, when it came to the last two senses, they remained at a standstill. Q was forced to become a total night owl to avoid the light, so he and Eliot switched their entire schedule around. He stopped taking the potion and started to learn Braille, for those days when he didn’t feel like putting on another audiobook. Daylight Savings was a bit of a blessing for once. Once Fall hit, sure, they could only use two nightlights maximum around the apartment, but he could wake up as early as 5:30pm and didn’t have to knock himself out with some melatonin until 4am at the earliest. And meals were…heartbreaking, if anyone’d asked Eliot’s opinion on the matter. Plain white toast, barely browned. Water. Rice. Unsweetened applesauce.

Eliot refused to surrender, though. If he had to build the stepladder up the food pyramid with his bare culinary hands, so be it. And, granted, Quentin wasn’t known for his refined palate. Before everything went to shit, if someone stuck a slice of Everything Pizza in his hands, Q’d happily claim he was getting every food group in one bite and be done with it. But a breakthrough was in there, somewhere. Eliot just had to find it. He had to. This was Quentin. They didn’t bring him back just to wallow in a tasteless hell for the rest of his life. And…shit…maybe, just _fucking_ maybe, “being brave” could get back on the table.

He had to run his plan past Margo about fifty million times. But on fifty million and one, he finally felt like he had the tits to…well, to at least _try_.

A week later, Quentin awoke in the familiar darkness of their bedroom. He almost went back to sleep, stretching his hand out and sliding it through the rumpled covers and bedsheets. The other side was cold. Eliot must have risen during the daytime. For something big enough to keep him out of bed ‘til now.

There was a small, rounded weight in his other hand. Oh. The little remote to those Bluetooth speakers Eliot had on his desk. Quentin definitely hadn’t grabbed that last night. And there was…a post-it note on his arm? He ran his finger over the little Braille bumps.

_Press play._

Where was that…raised line…on the play button…there.

“Hi, Q.”

His heart fluttered. Every _damn_ time, El.

“The night and the apartment are all ours. And I’ve got a little something planned. You need to get dressed first, though. I’ve laid out your softest hoodie, and there’s a pair of _my_ favorite sweatpants that I know you’ve been dying to steal from me. They’re at the foot of the bed.”

Quentin realized it wasn’t just another blanket keeping his toes toasty. He slowly rose up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. As he felt around for the promised clothes, his favorite voice in the world drifted and hummed in the darkness around him. He had no clue how Eliot could have found the time to make the recording. Eliot was excellent at keeping certain secrets, but horrible about keeping others. If this was one he’d kept…Quentin’s heart started thumping harder in his chest.

“If your feet are, as usual, total icebergs, you should still have some socks in your top drawer. But I’ve also got a spell going to heat the floors, so if they’re not too bad, feel free to go without.”

His feet were fine for now, so he hiked Eliot’ indigo sweatpants up his waist. A small thrill of goosebumps danced along his spine as the familiar fabric nestled on his hips. More than once, his hands wound up settled somewhere on Eliot’s body when he woke up. His thighs, his solid chest, his bony waist, and even his shins on one odd occasion, which Quentin chalked up to another nightmare he didn’t remember. These sweatpants, with their long expanse of soft cotton threads, slid under the pads of his fingers, like they were designed for that alone, every time Eliot wore them. Yes, he’d wanted to steal them for himself. But other times he just wanted to tug them off Eliot’s legs and –

“Now, I did need the lights for this. Almost all of them, honestly. In order for this to work, you’ll need one last thing. Feel around underneath my pillow.”

Right. There was a plan. He bit his lip to bring himself back. If there was one thing they never did these days, it was talk about _them_. Yes, El was never far, but that didn’t mean he was ready to be close. If he wanted that, he would have said something by now. What they had was good, and Quentin was lucky enough just to have it. He just had to keep telling himself that, and one day it would stick.

Eliot’s two pillows were bunched up to his right. Quentin swept his hands around in arcs, widening their curve the longer he searched. And then he felt the most _incredible_ thing.

God, he wished he could see it. There was no way to tell what color it was. But if Quentin knew Eliot, he’d hazard a guess it was red. No, not just red – scarlet. It was about as long as his arm, from the tip of his middle finger to the edge of his elbow. It wasn’t fleece, or even silk. Silk suddenly seemed pitiable, almost lowly, in comparison. This drifted over his skin like the feeling of a single drop of water trailing down his cheek.

“I had to commission someone to make it. It’s got a spell to adjust to the size of your head. Just join the two ends together. That way, there’s no chance it’ll synch around your scalp too tight, and it won’t pull your hair, either. It should block out all the light too.”

Eliot had gotten him a blindfold.

The goosebumps returned. They ran in a tidal wave all the way down his body. He shivered, pushing all thoughts of anything remotely steamy out of his head.

_Not gonna happen, stop it._

But he knew, he just _knew_ , that he was gonna be fighting his imagination for every inch of sanity tonight.

Pinching the blindfold from end to end, he settled it over his head, tucking his bangs up and over it on his brow. A faint rustling sound filled his ears. The fibers melded themselves over the bridge of his nose and around his cheeks like a mask. El hadn’t been exaggerating. There was only the faintest whisper of pressure above his ears.

“When you’re all set, just knock on the door, and we’ll get started.”

_Breathe, Quentin. Just breathe._

Outside the door, Eliot was adjusting his tie in the mirror one more time. Then, there was that one wrinkle in his sleeve that wouldn’t sit flat. And why hadn’t he picked a better pair of slacks for this. There was also this one curl that refused to cooperate. God, what if this didn’t work? What if he sent Q into a sensory spiral and –

There was the knock.

Shit. Showtime.

He went to the door, and opened it. He swallowed hard. Q was there, in Eliot’s pants, and the scarlet blindfold was coloring his face the most wicked shade of pink thanks to the hallway light. There was a thick silence as he shamelessly traced every inch of him with his eyes.

A minute ticked by. Then another. Q still had just a little bit of bedhead. Like he’d already been _wrecked_ for the night, and Eliot hadn’t even _done_ anything yet. Eliot was moments away from either A) calling the whole thing off and running out the front door, because he wasn’t going to be able to keep his hands to himself, or B) pushing Q back into the bedroom, because he wasn’t going to be able to keep his hands to himself.

“Did I put my sweatshirt on the wrong way, or…?” Quentin murmured.

“Hardly,” Eliot said, and then cleared his throat. He didn’t want to change a thing about how Q looked. But he had to do _something_. He stepped forward, and with a slow tug of his fingers, unzipped the grey hoodie down to his sternum. If he was going to torture himself, he might as well go all the way with it. He’d made sure the whole place was a pleasant 72 degrees, anyway. No one was gonna catch cold. And if Q’s breath hitched, Eliot was going to ignore it, like the absolutely non-lecherous gentleman he was. Then he licked two of his fingers and smoothed a lock of hair sticking up from Q’s head. He grazed his thumb across the ridge of the blindfold on his cheek. “Ready?”

“Ready for what?” Q said, a little hoarsely.

Instead of answering, because anything else would’ve ruined the atmosphere, he trailed his hand down Quentin’s shoulder, and came to stand at his side. He let him out of the hallway, tucking his arm into his elbow. Just like those days – forever and never ago – when he would lead Q over to the ladder when his hip was aching.

That’s when the smells hit them both, strong enough for Q to stagger sideways into Eliot’s shoulder. “You okay?” Eliot gripped his arm tight.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m…El, what is all that?”

Eliot swallowed again. He turned on his slightly pompous king voice and said, “I made you a minor feast.”

“Minor? God. It smells…”

“Good? Bad? Ugly?”

“I probably don’t have the right words,” Quentin huffed. An incredulous laugh was tugging at the edge of this voice.

Eliot took that as a good sign and asked if they could keep going. After a quick, still speechless nod from Q, they made their way down the spiral stairs and over to the breakfast bar in the kitchen. Quentin couldn’t see it, but the whole room basked in a warm glow of ambient light. Heat simmered in the air around them, radiating off of the stove and the two ovens below it. Lidded dishes, some porcelain, some metal, took up nearly every inch of counter space. Two place settings had been arranged at the bar, each with two gleaming forks, a knife, and a spoon.

“Your chair’s at one o’clock,” Eliot instructed, taking his arm away so Q could feel around for it with his arms. “Ah bup bup bup, that’s my chair.”

Quentin lifted his hands off and felt around for the correct one. He frowned. “You’re not gonna be…?” He used his right hand to pat a third chair next to his. “You have to eat too.”

Eliot kept himself from smiling and rolling his eyes. Then he remembered the blindfold, and let his grin out all the way. Trust Q to scold him right now, of all things. “I plan on it. There’s enough food in here to feed every talking animal in Fillory. No, I’ll be sitting on the edge of the bar, on your left. I’ll be feeding you.”

“Oh.”

Eliot stiffened. He should have practiced that line more. Why the _fuck_ had he said it like that? He just meant it might be hard for him to spear things, or cut things up. And it’s not like Q _didn’t_ like being taken care of every once in a while. But he’d thought the same thing during the shoelaces fiasco last month, and…

Shit. Ask, ask, _ask._

“Is that okay?” he said.

“Um. Y-yeah.”

Eliot put a hand on his shoulder, trying to stop his own brain from jumping to conclusions. “If, if anything makes you uncomfortable or doesn’t feel good, tell me. No matter what it is; no matter if we’re on dessert or just the first appetizer.”

Quentin was breathing heavily. Eliot had no way of knowing if the flush on his cheeks was from the heat in the kitchen or…But then Q seemed to shake it off. He quirked an eyebrow. “There’s dessert?”

“Only if you finish all your vegetables,” Eliot quipped before he could stop himself.

Quentin chuckled, thank god, then let his face go neutral. Without another word, he pulled the tall chair out and settled in.

Okay. Okay. Things were fine. Now came the part Eliot’d thankfully gotten the chance to rehearse a little. “Let me describe things to you?” he asked.

“Please?”

It seemed like Quentin’s hesitation was gone. He even sounded so damn hopeful. Eliot finally felt some confidence that he could pull this off, that he had done the right thing to put it all together. He was more determined than ever that tonight needed to work. Q _deserved_ this.

“The whole room is…” he paused, knowing the right word but building the mood just a little, “illuminated. With the same kind of light as a perfect sunset, filtering in through the Cottage’s front windows. Like someone wanted to paint just the color orange, but they got a little closer to suggesting yellow with their brush instead.”

Q smiled, his mouth opening just a little. “I know exactly what you mean,” he murmured.

“Good,” Eliot nodded. “Three inches in front of your zipper, there’s a slate-grey and blue cloth napkin, folded into a very fancy shape by yours truly. You should put in your lap.”

Quentin picked it up, running his fingers over the stitching. “Is there a pattern on this?”

“Oak leaves. Feel the points? Where the threads sharply meet in an abrupt angle, and then curve right down?”

“Yeah. Yeah, there they are.”

There was a flicker of movement beneath the blindfold. He could see Quentin’s eyes darting back and forth, and he even blinked a few times. Like he was trying so hard to see it, even though he couldn’t. Eliot knew the spells on the blindfold worked; he’d tested it himself before he left it for Q to find. Thanks to that, in this light, he could see Q’s imagination at work. Almost like he was dreaming. Eliot had spent countless, priceless hours watching him dream, and right now the blindfold made it so _visible_.

Questions about how he was feeling, about what was going on in that beautiful brain of his, burned in the back of Eliot’s throat. His cheeks flushed a little as he watched Q’s fingers dance over the napkin again, before setting it down in his lap and placing his hands on the edge of the bar. “Your silverware is next to both of your thumbs,” he continued, trying to keep his voice steady and his mind at a PG rating. “It’s all so polished, I could use the spoon as a mirror if I wanted. If you moved your knife in the light just a little, it practically sparkles, like a lens flare in a J.J. Abrams movie.”

Yeah, it was a corny comparison, but Q flashed another smile, so it was a point in his favor. When Eliot found a way of describing something, and nothing else fit, he went for it. Certain nerds liked it when he spoke their language, what could he say.

Walking around the bar to step into the kitchen, he snagged the two plates he’d set out earlier. He made sure to clink them against the marble, so Q knew what he was doing. “These plates have little blue flowers dotted around their surface. They’re the same robin’s egg blue as those blossoms we saw on the Rainbow Bridge. Their edges are lined with silver too.” Twisting his fingers together with a quick tut, he floated over a pitcher. “At two o’clock, you’ll find a tall glass. When I finish pouring this, why don’t you wash that just-woke-up taste out of your mouth?”

The water inside the pitcher was full of slices of cucumbers and mint. He’d put them in to steep before he’d done anything else in the kitchen today.

True to form, once Eliot finished pouring, Q chugged the water down without a smidge of poise. There was even a drop of water resting in the crease of his lip. And he was just letting it sit there. Without thinking, Eliot leaned over the bar and slowly wiped the drop away with his knuckle. Q responded to it instantly, tilting his chin to glance off of Eliot’s hand. Like he didn’t want the touch to stop. Had he done that with the water on purpose?

_Come on. Don’t read into it, Eliot. Not the time. Not the time._

“That wasn’t just water, was it?” Q asked.

“Just cucumbers and mint. A palate cleanser.”

“Huh.”

“But you can taste something’s different?”

Q nodded.

Eliot couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “That’s kinda what I’m going for. We’re going to get more complicated as we go, but only if you can handle it. Only if it’s good for you.”

_Damnit, again with the weird sentences._

“I’m sure it will be.” Quentin reached out a hand. After a beat, Eliot took it, and Quentin laced their fingers together.

Did Eliot really deserve that kind of faith? That kind of trust? On any given day, he was about two seconds from unfurling his giant list of reasons that people shouldn’t trust him with anything and –

Quentin squeezed his hand harder. “Whenever you’re ready, El.”

He let out all the air in his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered. For getting him out of his head. For trusting him anyway. For knowing him that well.

Quentin just nodded. He let go, letting his arms rest in his lap on top of the napkin. Although apparently he couldn’t do that for too long, since he then went to smooth his fingers over the blindfold again, running them in small circles on his cheekbone. That thing was turning out to be such a bad-but-really-good idea. Quentin was inherently a tactile person. He did everything with his hands. It wasn’t just how he experienced the world; it was how he thrived in it. Especially now. And that blindfold wasn’t doing Eliot any favors for how well it shaped his face in this light, how caressable his –

_Focus, Eliot. Fucking FOCUS._

He turned himself all the way around, his oxfords squeaking a little on the floor. Thankfully, prying the tin foil off the first plate next to the stove gave him something to do with his hands. “Tell me what you think of this. I’m putting it in the center of your plate. Please note, it’s the only thing I’m allowing you to use your hands for.”

Quentin jolted, reigning in his thoughts. Just barely. He set down his empty glass – far enough away that he wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally knocking it over. He patted around the plate for a second. “It’s…bread.”

“Baked from scratch, and fresh out of the oven not five minutes ago. Just…”

“Just what?”

Eliot crumpled the tin foil a little, and then unclenched his fingers. “Just like you taught me.”

Quentin blinked in surprise though the blindfold. He ducked his head. “Only after about a year of getting it wrong,” he shrugged sheepishly. Figuring out when it was okay to talk about their entire other life together was always a friggin’ minefield. His fingers twitched. “There’s a…Oh. Butter. Oops, sorry, I…” Quentin adjusted his grip in embarrassment.

“Butter and…?” Eliot encouraged.

With some hesitation, Quentin brought the slice to his lips, and took the heady aroma deep into his lungs. “Garlic? You made garlic bread?”

“How’s it taste?”

There was a moment of silence. Quentin opened his mouth and took a hesitant bite. Crackles erupted, and a few crumbs fell onto his lap. They both waited as he chewed, crunch after loud crunch, and then swallowed. Nothing happened. That is, until a wide grin broke out over Quentin’s fantastic, amazing, delightful, so damn kissable ( _stop it, Eliot_ ) face. He sank his teeth into the slice again, a huge bite this time. “So good,” he mumbled, and before he finished he was already launching in to another mouthful, and another, smiling all the while.

Eliot’s heart soared. He leaned back on the counter, and allowed himself a moment to dig in to his own piece. All beautiful crunchiness aside, the chewy center had just the right amount of airy warmth, and then the garlic came racing in like an unexpected compliment. Q was already reaching out for another by the time Eliot was halfway done. “Easy there,” he cautioned, his mouth still a little full. “If there is one rule we keep in this house, it’s ‘No filling up on bread before your real food gets here.’”

“That was never a rule,” Quentin scowled. But he slumped back in his seat obediently.

“It’s most certainly a rule now,” Eliot sniffed, not backing down, “since the next dish has some bread in it too.”

Quentin was tempted to make a snide comment, like “Oh dear, I’m actually full now, too bad,” but he bit it back. He didn’t dare risk disrupting what Eliot had planned. It was kinda _massive_ that the garlic bread worked, and he couldn’t wait for the next thing to try.

Another tap of ceramic on ceramic registered in his ears. Eliot must’ve set down the next dish, in some kind of container, not straight onto the plate itself. Quentin wiped the last of the crumbs off on his napkin, and inched his hands forward again. It was a bowl, cold to the touch, a contrast to the warm bread sitting in his stomach. He drifted over to where he hoped the forks were, but a gentle hand closed over his.

“Let me?” Eliot asked.

Quentin shivered, then bowed his head just a little in deference. “Go for it.”

He heard small crunches, then little clinks, as a fork pierced through the food and hit the bowl on the other side. It happened a few more times. He was getting multiple pieces into one bite. What kind of dish had bread in it? That bru-thing at Italian restaurants? Pita in Greek food?

“First bite.”

Quentin opened his mouth. And waited.

Something leafy hit his tongue. He closed his lips around it.

Tomatoes. God, was that what they tasted like? Not that he’d forgotten, but it was so strong. Like dunking his head underwater at the beach for the first time, but with taste. And there was that crunch, but it came from two completely different things. A chunk of cold cucumber, and…a crouton? No. There was more flavor to it. Way more. And it was bigger. A whole cube of hard bread. And the tomato slid over everything in a wash, soaking into it. Wait, that new tiny crunch was different. An onion. And the leafy feeling from earlier was from…some other kind of lettuce or something. Everything was basted in a sharp vinaigrette. Every time he chewed, the flavors washed through his mouth in a new combination.

“Oh-ho. My. God. There’s…” He took a deep breath. “There’s a lot going on there.”

Eliot was very quiet.

Right. Quentin swallowed, and they waited together. No acidic burning. No ashy aftertaste. He sat up straight again. “More please.”

“Incoming.”

When he opened his mouth again, there was a high-pitched screech. One of the bar chairs? He turned his head a little, and the fork poked him in the cheek. “Ow!” The firework of Eliot’s laugh burst out next to him, and the prodding tines backed off. Then there was another round of scooching chair noises. “Are your arms really that long, and I’ve just forgotten?” Quentin asked.

“What?”

Quentin heard more clinks, like Eliot was piercing stuff on his own plate. “How’s there a fork in my face when you’re over there?”

He heard a snort. “You do remember my Discipline, don’t you?”

“You do remember I just woke up, don’t you?” he shot back.

The fork tauntingly poked him again. Before it got too far away, he snagged it out of the air, wiping the smear of dressing from his cheek with his sleeve and chomping down on another complicated mouthful. They spent a few minutes eating the appetizer in a jokingly terse mood, exaggerating every bite. Eventually he asked what exactly they were eating, and Eliot, with all the blasé pretentiousness he could muster, explained how he’d chopped up the end pieces of the loaf he’d baked, toasted them even more, then combined those with the remaining cucumbers, and piled in a bunch of tomatoes, arugula, onions, basil, and whipped it all together with more garlic and salt and pepper and red wine vinegar and oil, to get panzanella salad.

“That’s a thing?” Quentin asked through another mouthful.

“Old Italian recipe,” Eliot confirmed.

“Seriously?”

“The wonders of Google.”

Quentin laughed. “I’d’ve paid money to see that. How many searches did you have to do? ‘Bread and cucumber recipes?’ ‘Simple fancy salad?’”

But Eliot didn’t answer. The only sounds drifting around them were a ticking clock, and the hum of the refrigerator nearby.

“El?”

He heard him take a deep breath. “Sorry, it’s just I’d…I’d give anything for you to _see_ ,” he said.

It was a snowy day in July when either of them were honest about how this shit really affected them. A frank admission like that, out of the blue, was damn near disorienting. Wanting to return the honesty, Quentin almost agreed with him right then. Shoving in another bite saved him.

As he chewed, inwardly he had to admit he missed the tiniest things so fucking much. He missed the fucking fonts in his books. Finding the only two constellations in the night sky that he knew, then staring up for ages at the rest of the stars. Marveling at the CGI that movies could pull off these days. Solving those stupid puzzles on cereal boxes. Shaving his own face in the mirror. Watching Eliot nibble his bottom lip as he tried to choose between two different waistcoats. Catching a bare slip of skin that Eliot didn’t know he was exposing as he turned over in his sleep. Seeing Eliot’s shining hazel eyes dart back and forth as he assessed something Quentin said, looked away, and then met his eyes again with renewed resolve. Eliot’s face could be so complicated. He could say a dozen things with just a squint, a twitch of his nose, raising an eyebrow, licking his lips. And Quentin had gone hours, days, weeks, _months_ without enough light to see any of it.

Quentin set his fork down. Inching his left hand over, he hit the solid mass of Eliot’s arm. He felt him tense as he skirted his touch up to his shoulder, and he only just managed to stop himself from cupping Eliot’s neck. Because they didn’t do that these days. But it was as close as he could get.

“I wouldn’t want you to.”

“But – ”

“Listen,” he said, smiling fondly through the jumbled-up mess he always ended up shoving down into the pit of his stomach, “if you did, then I would…just end up doing something to get it back for you.” He used his other hand to rub the fringe of hair on the back of his own neck. “I’m done losing…” – _you_ – “more things just because we miss something we used to have. I’ve had enough of us _sacrificing_ , haven’t you?”

Eliot watched Quentin, and ached, fucking _ached_ , for that hand on his neck to be his. That move had more than half a century of _we’re grounding each other in this beautiful moment_ behind it, and he needed that comfort more than ever. Because he wasn’t so sure. Relationships were inherently about giving. Granted, he didn’t have an eclectic mix of _relationship_ relationships to draw examples from. Really, he just had this one. The only one that he’d do anything to get the chance to have again.

For now, he supposed he could give Quentin that too: agreeing with him. Promising to hold off on the sacrificing and to just do everything with what they had.

“I…yeah,” he managed.

“If my eyes come back, they come back. If not, I’ll, I dunno, find a, uh, temple somewhere. And I’ll turn into a wise sage that’ll…give out quests to teach those, um, darn young magicians some life lessons. Or I’ll just become Daredevil.” Quentin took his hand away from Eliot’s shoulder and sat back in his chair. He tilted his head, his bangs hanging loose in the air, and Eliot knew he’d be gazing hopefully at him if he could. _Come on, work with me here_ , his posture said.

Retreating back into safe banter territory, Eliot snorted, and resumed digging into his panzanella with gusto. “Does that mean I’ll have to become some doe-eyed shrine maiden? Massaging Master Sage’s joints and getting high off the good incense?”

“Um. What?” Q tried to spear some more tomatoes, but they just kept getting pushed around in the bowl.

He saw the struggle Q was having, and bit an offer to take over. Q would ask for help if he wanted to. “Nevermind. I’m not on my game tonight.”

Eventually, another forkful came together, and Quentin smiled around it when he popped it into his mouth. “I mean, you’re _only_ putting an entire, carefully planned, multi-course banquet together from scratch,” he snarked. “Can’t believe everything you say isn’t Monty Python material.”

“You’re Monty Python material,” Eliot retorted lamely. But the tension eased out of his shoulders, and he slouched a little in relief. With both of them willing to play into the awkwardness, and with the light mood restored, they finished the salad with a final zing of onions and arugula. Quentin even asked Eliot to put the last forkful together for him.

Whisking away the bowls with magic and settling them in the sink, Eliot stood back up to find the next dish. Technically, he could stay sitting, and just summon everything over. But there’d never been a meal in his life he didn’t orchestrate a performance around. This symphony was his, and he was going to conduct it with his own two hands as much as possible. He lifted the closest lid, and a hearty breeze of steam danced over his eyes. He was two-for-two so far. This next attempt was stepping things up a bit. Well, next two attempts. The tongs clicked open, and he walked over to plate the stalks down. Quentin was already reaching for his silverware.

“Hey, you,” Eliot scolded playfully. “Hands off.”

Quentin’s leg started to bounce up and down. Through the sculpted surface of the blindfold, Eliot could see the lines of a deep pout brewing. He looked about this far away from whining like a kindergartener.

“I’m not done serving you yet. Wait,” he said, before Q could get out a single complaining syllable.

Privately, he was sympathetic. After half a year of boring, boring, boring, there was nothing worse than being told to hold back when exciting tastes were at your fingertips.

Or.

Maybe he wasn’t that sympathetic. Quentin’s cheeks were getting quite rosy. His chest rose and fell rapidly as he sat up straighter. Eliot’s brain filled with an old memory, which he kinda had to dredge up from the edge of his mind to get all the details. As soon as it played itself out, he tried to push it away. He called over a little boat of sauce to drizzle over the greens he’d served himself. But the memory wouldn’t leave.

It was the sixth time they’d fucked, after their one-year anniversary. Quentin had risen early and grabbed a diagram to start that day’s pattern, not realizing it was one they’d already done. Eliot, still hungover from a bad night, had launched himself out of the cabin to stop him, just to see Quentin’s denim-sculpted ass up in the air, their quilt wrapped around his back to keep the morning chill away, as he knelt over a stretch of red tiles. Eliot could only string together enough thought to get out the word, “Wait.” And Q…Q hadn’t listened. He just kept putting tiles down. He wouldn’t stop. So Eliot went down to grab Quentin’s hand, and repeated, “Wait,” and…there had been a pause. He did stop.

But Eliot just went fucking mute, because Q’s face was the only thing shading his eyes from Fillory’s blazing orange sun, and he looked like a fucking angel. A confused angel, because Eliot didn’t say anything else for ten straight minutes. So he kept going, and Eliot could only say, “Wait,” again, ‘cause his brain was stuck, and then Q’d gotten frustrated when he’d tried to yank the tiles out of his hands. They’d started to shove at each other as Eliot kept repeating “wait” over and over, scattering tiles everywhere, and Eliot’d landed on his back as they wrestled.

And he’d gotten hard, had slotted his hand behind Q’s neck and pulled him down for a kiss, had licked into his mouth, had turned the kiss filthy, fucked his mouth with his tongue, until Quentin was keening with loud moans every time they breathed, until Quentin was pulling every single piece of their clothes off and tossing them far away, and, beautifully naked, shamelessly slowly rutting onto Eliot’s thigh, pressing Eliot into the ground as those shockingly cold tiles pressed against his back, fitting his mouth right next to Eliot’s ear and groaning and breathing and shaking as Eliot’s hands massaged his lower back and he chased that hot feeling spreading like wildfire in their bellies, all while the quilt stayed draped over them like a tent. And Eliot had adjusted them, pulling Q’s leg over his hips until Eliot’s dick was sliding up between the cheeks of his perfect ass, and they kept kissing, high on each other, Q’s tongue pressing into Eliot’s mouth, Eliot’s dick thrusting up with only sweat and precum to ease the way. He’d been a second away from coming when Quentin had stopped moving, and pinned a hand to his chest. Then he rose up, the quilt falling from his shoulders, glared down at Eliot, and said, “Wait.”

And Eliot was frozen in place as Quentin, bathed in the glory of the rising sun, wrapped a hand around his own cock and pumped it slowly, thrusting his hips to back tease Eliot’s cock behind him, until he finally sped up the jerks of his fist and spilled streaks of cum all over Eliot’s chest with the hottest groan Eliot’d heard in his entire life. And he made Eliot stay there, pinned to the ground, as he came back down. He’d grinned, knowing Eliot was completely at his mercy.

And Quentin, right now, in their kitchen, looked nothing so much as that same man, behaving himself exclusively on his own terms. Eliot slammed that memory away again, and this time it stayed gone, thank god. They were here. In this timeline. Recovering from a bunch of shit and just trying to live their best lives. Trying to get Quentin to eat good things. Definitely not throwing everything off the table and fucking him right there on the counter, damn the consequences.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t get away with one thing. One tiny provocative thing. He wiped an errant smear of sauce on the plate away, and sucked each of his fingers clean, making that telltale popping noise as he watched Q’s face flush even further. “You get to choose,” he said, floating the second dish over and ladling a hefty portion onto an empty section of his plate. “Starch, or more of those vegetables I said you had to finish.”

Quentin noticeably shifted in his seat. “Can you actually tell me what I’m eating this time first?”

“Yeah,” Eliot chuckled, “I can do that.” _Victory_ , he thought to himself. He sat back down in his own chair. “On the left you’ve got some lush broccolini. Buttered and salted, with no crunch to it at all. It’ll melt in your mouth. Some recipes suggest a little teriyaki sauce to go with it, so if you can handle that, I can add it. If you’re feeling really snazzy, I can sprinkle some sesame seeds and a squeeze of lemon juice on top, like I did with mine. And on the right…oh, just some scalloped potatoes.”

“You, you can’t just leave it like that.”

Eliot leaned back in his chair. “Like what?”

“What did you do, with the potatoes? Every decent chef explains their dishes, come on.”

“Do they now?”

Quentin blinked through the blindfold a few times, then crossed his arms. “You especially. And you know it.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” he ground out, swallowing and shifting in his chair even more obviously. But he was still keeping his hands to himself, Eliot didn’t miss that. Quentin brought his voice down low. “Don’t you want me to _know_? Don’t you want me to tell you how _good_ it is? How I can _taste_ all the different ingredients? I mean, how else’ll I know what’s been done to it?”

“I suppose so,” Eliot sighed. He was not going to react to the way Quentin rolled the word ‘taste’ around on his tongue like _that_. Not at all. So instead, he folded his arms, put both elbows on the table, and leaned in close. Listing off each ingredient, he lowered his voice too, like he was sharing a dirty secret. “Those scalloped potatoes, also known as potatoes au gratin, are almost _bubbling_ hot. They’ve been baking in layers of, first, a cream sauce with nutmeg, garlic powder, thyme, and rosemary, and then, second, layers of fresh parmesan and gruyere, for. Four. And a half. Hours.”

“Then why,” Quentin asked, mirroring Eliot’s posture, “are we still talking about it?”

Goosebumps ran from the tip of Eliot’s scalp, down to the end of his spine, and through his arms. He flicked a tut at the other fork sitting untouched beside Q’s plate, and the knife. He teased him with some sounds, little dings of the silverware working together to prepare a bite. And when Quentin opened his mouth expectantly, he placed a piece of broccolini on his tongue instead of the potatoes.

“Because,” Eliot answered, “I don’t want you to burn your tongue.”

Quentin grunted, but his frustration was very short-lived. Having never tasted broccolini in his life, he wasn’t surprised to find it almost exactly like broccoli, just with thinner…um. Trees? Or, whatever those little buds clustered together at the top were called. And the stalks were longer, like asparagus. But his sense of taste wasn’t hating this new experience either. Normally, Quentin liked his broccoli to have a hint of toughness to it, but he saw why Eliot’d cooked this a little longer. The actual consistency had less in common with the panzanella and the garlic bread, sure, but the texture wasn’t dissimilar to other “safe” foods he’d had before. Even if it was a little back-to-the-basics, the broccolini had an absolutely perfect ratio of butter to salt, warm and rich.

He understood the genius of it all now. Eliot was toying around with what they knew to be safe, food-wise. He was dressing each new thing up a little, giving it a miniscule dash of flair without being overwhelming. Everything was tied together somehow, either by ingredients or texture. How _creative_ was that? How _considerate_? For most of his life, food had been an afterthought to Quentin – fuel in the tank to keep his brain from crashing. Stick him in a restaurant, and the first thing he looked for on the menu was some spruced-up version of chicken tenders, like chicken parm, or a caesar salad wrap, and then he’d widen his scope from there if he had to. Not out of preference or pickiness, just habit. Whatever was easy on his gut, and cheap. It came with the territory of having lower middle-class parents who didn’t cook so much as ‘reheat.’

And it came with the territory of depression meals, but those were their own thing.

Now, being back from the dead? It forced him to consider how many old habits he was going to actively try to relearn, and which ones to leave behind. Tonight, Eliot was giving him the chance to break out of that cycle, while still slightly staying in it. Baby steps. Not sprinting forward, but not pedaling backward either.

He decided it couldn’t hurt to try one with the teriyaki sauce next. But the second he did, he immediately regretted it. He coughed, yanking his napkin up off of his lap. His eyes watered as he gagged. His mouth, tongue, and the back of his throat were on fire, burning like he’d chugged an entire bottle of Tabasco. He spat the half-chewed mush onto the napkin, bending over and nearly hitting his head on the counter.

Eliot was at his side instantly. “Q! What – spit it out, all of it!”

Shuddering, he made himself obey. He wanted nothing more than to have one of Eliot’s hands smooth circles along his back, but didn’t dare ask. If one sense went wrong, there was no telling if others were soon to follow. At least the blindfold hadn’t moved an inch; he still seemed to be in total darkness. A series of soothing questions from Eliot helped him check in with himself. They’d perfected this over countless disasters: confirming that he could still hear okay, that none of his clothes seemed to be suffocating him or anything, and they weren’t too hot or too cold. No nausea, either. There was a bitter reek flooding his nose and his mouth, but that was a given.

When he got his breath back, he begged for a sip of that water he’d had earlier. The glass was in his hands almost before he finished asking. As much as he wanted to chug it down, he took hesitant sips instead. “The mint in this really helps,” he said in between swallows, trying to offer something positive.

“Okay,” Eliot said, his voice breaking on the vowels. “Noted. Keeping that. In mind.”

Shame spiked through Quentin’s heart. A tiny voice of reason tried to insist there was no way he could have known, but it was drowned out. If only he’d gone for just the sesame seeds, or the lemon, or just not pushed his luck at all. Eliot’d put so much into this. He’d done the research, thought everything through probably a hundred times, gotten up early to make all this himself. And then Quentin had disgustingly spat it back out because he couldn’t just keep it together. To top it all off, El was probably wringing his hands raw. Beating himself up about what he could have done, what he might have done wrong, all the variables he should have worked harder to control.

“El?”

“What do you need?” His voice was close, but much too far away.

“Gimme your hand for a second?”

“You sure?”

“I need your hand, El.”

Quentin set down his water once his fingers edged along the side of his palm. A scorching feeling erupted on Quentin’s hand when he took Eliot’s, like he’d left it out in the sun for two days straight and it’d been badly sunburned. Instead of releasing, like his instincts screamed at him to do, he made himself grip tighter. “This isn’t going to put a stop to things, alright?” he said quietly.

The reply was little more than a whisper. “I am this close to calling it off, Q.”

And Q, for one wild moment, feared there was something else behind that sentence. “No. Nuh uh. Those potatoes are calling my name.”

“We can try again tomorrow. Nothing I can’t pop in the microwave.”

“I can hear your brain coming at you from here. Stop punishing yourself. Please. I couldn’t take it if all your work just…” He hesitated, searching for some kind of non-morbid threat that Eliot would take seriously. Maybe if he switched tracks. “Listen, you take all that food away from me, I’m going feral. Like, a legit food goblin. I will spell myself a doggy bag and stuff my face in some dingy corner the second you turn your back.”

Well, that was an image Eliot didn’t expect. It was this close to convincing him. If not for one thing. Wordlessly, he took Q’s napkin with his free hand, spelled it clean, and settled it back on his lap. He wrapped that same hand around the top of Quentin’s. Traced the little hairs on the back, and followed the opaque veins beneath. “Then…don’t you punish yourself either, about the way your body reacted. Okay? I’ll…forgive myself, but only if you do the same for you.”

Q shook his head in disbelief. “Shit.”

They really knew each other so fucking well. Just when he thought the lines between them were ready to stop blurring, some new thing came along and mixed them up even more. If he refused, then that tiny little epiphany about breaking old habits was just gonna turn into a steaming pile of hypocrisy.

“Okay. You got it,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.” He squeezed Eliot’s hand, biting his lip as the burning feeling raced up the nerves of his arm even more. Eventually they moved into “this is crossing the boundaries of what we technically are to each other” territory, and Quentin forced himself to let go.

Although, he still wanted something to do with his hands. Beyond drawing Eliot’s head down to his chest, anyway. Beyond running his fingers through his long curls, height difference be damned. Beyond feeling Eliot just close his eyes, with Quentin’s chin on the crown of his head, and with the thump of Quentin’s heart pressed to Eliot’s ear, as he ran a hand up and down his back. Beyond being the one comforting Eliot for once.

He settled for flipping the zipper of his hoodie up and down. “You think we could, like, try to work our way back up…To…?” he murmured, and then made himself trail off. He hadn’t thought about the subtext until half the sentence was already out there. And fuck him sideways, he couldn’t see what El’s face was doing right now. The blindfold tickled a little as his own expression went through about a dozen different shapes. Panic was setting in. “So, like,” he stammered, and then cleared his throat, trying to stall for time.

Because there was also one of those _l’appel du vide_ impulses spreading through his chest, like someone’d popped helium balloons inside him. Because he could just leave the ball in Eliot’s court. Because it didn’t _have_ to mean anything, unless they both decided the question did. Right?

“So, you mean,” Eliot jumped in, “Garlic bread again, then the salad, and then try the – ”

“Yeah, makes sense, right? What d’you think?” Q rushed to say.

Thank. Fuck.

But.

Goddamnit.

“I dunno if you have enough room in there for that,” Eliot said, jabbing Q in the ribs. Because loving slights about the size of Q’s appetite were easier for both of them to handle. Quentin played along, scoffing in protest. He heard Eliot walk back into the kitchen, and his face finally calmed the fuck down, the blindfold smoothing back out again. “We’ve got plenty,” Eliot went on, “but if your body lets you make it to the entrée, it’d be so much worse to fill up on appetizers, and then have no room for…”

It was just like before. Q took the bait. “For…what?”

“I’ll tell you after the potatoes.”

“Then get me. Some potatoes.”

He heard that recognizable metal-on-china scraping sound, and a complicated bouquet of smells filled his nose. The tip of his spoon pressed on his lower lip, and a mound of potatoes touched his cupid’s bow. He opened his mouth slowly, and made sure _not_ to read anything into a small, sharp inhale from the only other person in the room. It was fine. They were both still on edge. Little tells – _concerns_ – like that slipped through. No matter how hard you tried to hide them.

Plus, these potatoes were the best goddamn food he’d tasted in six goddamn months. So he made sure to say as much, verbatim.

Eliot let out a pleased little giggle, more for relaxing himself than anything. That steady, heavy worry was starting to ease back out of his brain, replaced with a dusting of pride. He couldn’t deny they were really fucking good potatoes. It’d be too much to hope that Q could taste _every_ single little spice, sure. Where the nutmeg and the garlic and the salt had soaked in. Where the thyme and pepper and rosemary danced around on top. It wasn’t like he could put that in to words, not with his taste buds still so fragile. And Eliot had decided against adding that pinch of paprika he usually put in, so the dish didn’t have that famous little kick to it. But when he took his own bite, the cheese left these gorgeous trails along the spuds, the parmesan popping up here and the gruyere surprising him there, and when his teeth smashed them into each other, it was like sinking into a picnic made of sunshine and happiness.

He almost got lost in it for a bit, nearly forgetting to prep another bite and cool it off so Q could keep eating. To be fair, Q nearly seemed to forget he got to have more than one taste. Eliot could see his tongue pushing around in his cheeks for the last little flecks, and he had to cover his mouth to keep from turning into a full-on giggly bitch about it.

“Pssst. Have some more,” Eliot goaded.

“Holy fuuuuck, El,” Quentin eloquently complimented. Right before opening his mouth and practically inhaling another spoonful.

Daaaaaaaamnit, Q. You do not say a sentence like that, with that tone of voice, and think Eliot fucking Waugh was going to just sit there and not say something very dirty and suggestive. This whole night was turning into a tug o’ war across his entire emotional spectrum. What the hell had he done to deserve this?

No. Eliot fucking Waugh was a – relatively – mature as fuck adult. He was also a dramatic romantic at heart, and he had enough willpower to decide not to waste the potential for amorous declarations of _Feelings_ later just for the sake of some flippant innuendo now. Breathe. Calm the fuck down. And eat some more de-fucking-licious potatoes.

Quentin appeared to have lost all ambition to tease him. His chewing was slow, savoring. That comfortable silence, the one between two close people happy to just enjoy good food together, settled over them. They made their way through their servings almost ceremoniously. He was practically sculpting each little disc on the spoon. It was ponderous. But restorative.

Once they finished, finally breaking the quiet, Q asked, “You sure these aren’t the main course?”

And he almost had a point. “If I hadn’t made the main course with my own two hands, I’d say no and serve us some more.”

“You’re amazing, you know that?”

With no other preamble. He just said it. Eliot was struck dumb all over again. How easily this man could light him up from the inside. From a smile to a laugh, for either small reasons or the big ones. Every low point was worth it when he felt Q raise his spirits like this. “I know,” he replied, because the only way to deflect a compliment properly was by accepting it. “Because I keep amazing company.”

Q tried to hide his face by lowering his head, another marginal tragedy of the evening, but the blindfold gave enough away so Eliot didn’t miss it. The temptation to speak up pressed in. He could say everything weighing on his heart right now. The moment was growing. He could build on it, lay his hopes out all in a line, and wait for whatever came after to either make or break him. He was just enough of a coward, and a stickler for The Right Moment, that he didn’t.

After a quick question about it from Eliot, they mutually decided to set the broccolini aside, so he wiped their plates clean with a quick spell. The main course wasn’t about to be blemished by anything that’d come before. All of the pieces were waiting for them in a polished stainless-steel sauté pan, still on the stove. Carrying the pan over, a few pieces of cutlery trailed along in the air after him. He served Quentin first, waving the large tongs away once done, and then plucking a ladle out of the air to dole out a healthy portion of the sauce from the pan next. The final touch was to use a pair of sugar tongs to place a little pile of flavor on top. A mere garnish, but no less important.

Okay. Deep breath. If this didn’t work out, it wasn’t gonna be the end of the world. Maybe the end of his confidence in the kitchen. For a little while. But not the end of the world. “Your entrée for this evening…is…steak medallions. They come with seared, golden pearl onions, and braised in a sauce of beef stock, a decent-year merlot, tomato paste, thyme, and salt and pepper.”

“S-steak?”

_Oh yes, Q. Steak._

Eliot delicately cut off a modest piece, ran it through the dark sauce, and pierced one of the translucent onions so it could pave the way. Q tilted his head a little at the sound, and he unsteadily brushed his bangs back into place again. As if he could sense it was getting closer, Eliot then saw the outline of his eyelids closing. He watched him reverently raise his head back, and he inhaled the hearty aroma wafting through the air. It overtook every other scent. He dropped his jaw, opening his mouth halfway.

It should be fucking illegal to make that face. Eliot had enough memories of that face to –

Stop. Stop. Crap, his slacks were getting a little tight. Stop. _Stop_. God, this anticipation was the best kind of curse. Probably for both of them. Hello, he reprimanded himself, he was putting off the verdict. Yes, his memory was betraying him, in all the best ways, but that was no excuse. This dish was either gonna be a roaring triumph, or another round of heartbreak they’d have to weather together. He had to remember that, had to use it to re-center himself and stop delaying the inevitable.

He sent the fork on its way, and Quentin took the bite. He chewed so slowly, so carefully, like he’d never tasted steak before. Then he swallowed, making Eliot lick his lips without realizing, and sighed. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” he declared with soft certainty.

Eliot ascended to nirvana for a split second. “You bet your ass it is,” he gloated, still a little shaken. He wasn’t an idiot; Q was _such_ a steak man. There was no way Eliot would have planned this dinner around lobster or scallops. Or something as timid as shrimp or chicken; fuck no. Not with the way it had to build. Not with the flavors he handpicked. “Cooked medium-well, with just a dash of pink.”

“And yours is medium. Or medium rare, depending on what you were in the mood for tonight,” Quentin remembered, a fond afterthought, almost like he didn’t know he’d said it out loud.

Eliot placed an appreciative hand on his arm. “Do you want me to cut yours up? So you can do it yourself?” he conceded.

“Can I have another piece of steak first, and then I’ll answer?” Quentin said. A bit grave, but also rather wry. Like he was overwhelmed. Like it was foolish of Eliot to give him something _else_ to think about. Not that he was drooling on the spot or anything. But his voice sounded like he was damn close.

Eliot raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why?” he pushed back, before he could stop himself. There was only so many times he could deny that other hunger that’d been coursing through him all night.

Quentin didn’t even bother with banter. He just turned his head and waited. More of a retort than any spoken word. Well. Indulging him was one of Eliot’s many hobbies. This time, he prepared the taste like it was meant to be experienced. A slip of onion, half of the meat slathered in sauce, the other half bare. Q chewed this one with his eyes closed too. As if that enhanced it even more, somehow. Eliot could hear his teeth pressing down, making the juices flow inside his cheek and along his tongue.

Q finally swallowed, and exhaled like he’d been meditating. “I think I’m fine with you doing it for me.”

Eliot closed his eyes in disbelief and gave a little shake of his head. His resolve was hanging by a thread, almost permanently ruined at this point. “Honestly, with the faces you’ve been making, I don’t know if I should. I feel like you and the steak need the room to yourself. My backup plan’s getting jealous.”

“Backup plan?”

“A boring alternative. Not worth your time,” Eliot sighed gratefully, being honest.

“Well now I _have_ to know,” Quentin murmured. And he pushed. His plate. Away.

The nerve. His backup plan, which was cooling on the far edge of the counter, was a flaky Alaskan salmon marinated for six hours in honey, lemon zest, parsley, thyme, dill, and olive oil. But, come on, Q. When you’re in the middle of the main course, you don’t talk about the things you could be eating instead.

“You’ll know when we try it tomorrow,” he responded. To hammer the reprimand home, and to remind Quentin exactly what he’d just pushed away, he mentally raised his own knife and fork and cut into his own steak. “Or maybe later on tonight. We’ve got a lotta hours to get through ‘til dawn.”

He took a bite, closing his eyes. It really did help to hone in on the tiny things. There was nothing but the flavors. Nothing but the other little sensory things his brain constantly tuned out. Nothing but Quentin less than a foot away.

The more Eliot contemplated what they were doing right now, the more he realized something. The banter was too easy to slip into sometimes. It was a sign of their friendship, of course. But in a way, it became another tiny barrier between them, keeping them from getting as close as they could be. Why show the fragility of your own heart when you could trade a few bouts with someone’s intellect instead. Everything else was allowed to get hurt; just not your heart.

Did Q think that was how things were gonna go tonight? Were the little moments they’d already had going to be all they’d get, if they kept this up? He hadn’t meant for all the teasing and semi-flirting to steer things too far in that direction. They had to get back to the genuine side of things.

He swallowed his food. His hand was still resting on Q’s arm. He brushed his thumb along it, back and forth. “It is a boring alternative, in comparison,” Eliot asserted. “Because I know that you wouldn’t love it nearly as much. And I wouldn’t be getting the chance to see how happy this’s made you.”

The smirk fell from Q’s face. “Oh,” he managed. “Okay.” He nodded, pulling away from Eliot’s touch, wishing there was some way he could apologize for mistaking his sincerity for something else. Reaching out to pull the plate back, he settled his hands in his lap. Another piece of steak was ready for him in moments. He made sure not to hide his smile as he relished it all over again. Wanting to take things a step further, he did for the steak what he’d promised to do for the potatoes: praising the way the sauce hit his tongue with a sharp tang, and, after another bite, how the sweetness of the onions balanced the savory flavors of the beef.

Eliot was quiet through all this. Quentin hoped he was smiling. For all the times he paraded his many skills around like a peacock, he really didn’t get properly, _verbally_ praised as much as he deserved to. And as they kept eating, Eliot’s last two sentences still rang in his head. Quentin once believed he had memorized a million ways to gauge what El was thinking. The crooked way he’d flick his wrist at someone, or when he fiddled with the buttons of his coat while exhaling, or if he knotted his tie much too loose one morning. All silent hints. Being sightless for half a year made it impossible to rely on so many of the old cues. And Eliot was choosing to be selfless enough, on top of everything else he was doing for him tonight, to bring him behind the curtain a little. Getting these little peeks at what El was thinking was…almost another gift in of itself, separate from every delicious thing he’d had so far. To use his words, so Q could see into his mind. To communicate not with glibness but with honesty. To do away with the safe haven of pretention, for the chance of connection.

And that’s what fed Quentin’s hopes. That someday, they might be _together_ again. For all his talk earlier tonight, about not wanting to sacrifice anything else, to be happy for what he had right now, the friend-…no. Relation….no. The _whatever-the-hell-this-thing-between-us-is-_ ship that he had with Eliot couldn’t stay like this for the rest of their lives. He had a base-of-Maslow’s pyramid need for him. All of him. Together they could share more, know each other more, strengthen each other more, comfort each other more, trust each other more. Kiss. Snuggle outside the excuse of sleep. Make love for hours like they once did. Hold each other when they cried. Make each other laugh. Live their entire lives with each other again.

Unless Eliot planned on leaving. When he thought Q didn’t need him anymore.

Fuck. No. He’d managed to keep that thought out of his brain for a week. This was not the time to go down _that_ rabbit hole again.

Quentin was starting to feel full.


	2. Chapter 2

He precariously trailed the tips of his fingers across the counter, until his knuckle found his glass. He took a long drink, emptying it.

“You don’t have to finish if you’re getting full,” he heard Eliot say.

“Just. Um. Making sure I have room for dessert.” He started to feel guilty, then forced himself to remember that Eliot wouldn’t want him to. “But you can – I can wait ‘til – I want you to finish yours first.”

He heard Eliot crack his neck and take a breath, like he was about to say something. Then he appeared to decide against it, as the little clinks of his knife resumed. One of the things they had to relearn, after spending almost every minute in each other’s company, is that they did _not_ have to always put the other first. Or, in another sense, they were putting the other person first by putting themselves first.

As he chewed, Eliot felt his adrenaline spike. The meal was winding down. “We don’t have to keep sitting here for it, actually,” he said. Even though Quentin wasn’t looking at him, he still turned his eyes down, as if he could avoid scrutiny. “How’d you like it if we lit the fire?”

Q’s eyebrows rose up behind the blindfold. “Yeah, I…we haven’t really – Sure. Um. Anything I can do to help clean up?”

Magic mostly took care of the dishwashing, drying, and putting away the plates, but Q couldn’t really cast without his eyes. Hard to calculate certain Circumstances without being able to see them, no matter what someone tells you they are. They’d made a few attempts. One of the reasons they hadn’t kept trying was a lack of confidence on Quentin’s part, and Eliot hadn’t pushed. To continue trying…also meant admitting this situation might be permanent.

He didn’t want him to worry about not doing his part. There was technically nothing stopping them from putting the leftovers away by hand. Doing everything by hand, really. And if they happened to brush hands, and talk about…anything, really, and make each other smile, that’d be pretty wonderful.

But Eliot’s fortitude had its own circumstances. And the longer his imagination had to play with different outcomes, the more likely it was to sour any direction the evening could go. “N-Mm. Next time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Q warned, although his tone was hopeful.

One last piece, and he finished his medallions. With a wave of his hand, he cleared everything away. “You want me to lead you over to the – ”

“Nah, I’ll be good. You probably need to prep things and, you know, make sure the feast fits into the fridge right. Don’t want to get in your way.” He pushed his chair back to stand up. He folded his napkin into a neat square beside his plate, and he turned around to shuffle away.

Okay. Yeah, they…they needed a little space. He could do that. He forced himself to stop watching Q as he went along. A habit he’d promised to kick after one of their first arguments.

Packing everything away would give him the chance to clear his head. As much as he wanted to multitask, it was better to do one thing at a time, and his stress levels did, in fact, go down with every chore. Q’s last medallion went into a Tupperware container with the rest of the onions and sauce. The potato dish got a layer of saran wrap. Then the tin foil he’d fiddled with earlier went back over the garlic bread, and the broccolini went into a glass bowl, whose twin housed the panzanella, and he brazenly – or, perhaps, a little cathartically – chucked the entire teriyaki sauce mix into the garbage. He managed to Tetris everything into the fridge, and went about casting the necessary spells on the remaining dirty dishes.

Thanks to all this, he barely noticed the little jolts of noise that came with Q’s bumbling trek over to the mantel. There was a tiny _whoosh_ somewhat later, when the gas caught. He turned to see the flames flickering cheerily among the decorative glass rocks. Q lifted his fingers from the switch and made his way around the freestanding wall, heading towards the round green chairs on the other side.

Suddenly Colin Firth’s swearing tirade from _The King’s Speech_ ricocheted and slingshotted around in Eliot’s head. It was time. It was fucking _time_. Turning back, he snagged some oven mitts from a hook on the wall, and pulled down the oven door. Heat washed over his face, just a bit hotter than the color rising all over his cheeks and neck and chest.

Sliding the dessert out onto the bar, he got down two small plates. Then he decided against those and sent them away, almost dropping one when he didn’t concentrate hard enough. He doled out huge portions into two cereal bowls. A pair of soup spoons whizzed out of a drawer below the cabinets next. This was not going to be a dessert of dainty bites. Like the worse waiter ever, he balanced the bowls with one arm pressed to his chest, slipped the spoons between his fingers, and wrapped the other arm around a huge metal bowl from the fridge, which he then shut with a kick from his foot.

_Deeeeep fucking breath, Eliot. You can always be a massive chickenshit coward and not say anything, right?_

He came out of the kitchen, shut off the lights, and rounded the fireplace to…something that stopped him short. Q was on the floor. He didn’t look like he’d fallen, thank fucking god. His legs were stretched out across the black and white carpet towards the fire, and he was leaning back against the base of the green chair behind him. His hands were splayed out on the floor to keep himself upright. The blindfold revealed the outline of his closed eyes, and his head reclined back against the chair cushion, the light flickering across his face.

Eliot had planned for all of this to take place…not on the floor.

Q must have heard Eliot freeze. He made that trademark snort-laugh combination sound in the back of his throat, the one that always made Eliot want to join in too.

“Is there a reason we’re boycotting chairs now?” Eliot asked.

“So,” Q said, his voice gravelly as he tried to speak despite the awkward angle, “I was going to sit down.”

“But?”

“But. I got to thinking.”

Eliot sang under his breath, “A dangerous pastime.”

“I knooow,” Q droned, finishing the lyric. He lolled his head a little, tilting it in Eliot’s direction. “I was all ‘El’s gonna do something even more amazing and I really wanna thank him somehow but I don’t know how.’” He used his hands to push himself back up, sitting up straighter. Scratching the back of his head above the blindfold, he frowned. “And then I was all ‘How’m I gonna thank him for everything? What words’ll tell him that I really, really mean it, when I feel like all I ever do is thank him, and not do anything for him back?’ And then my shin hit the chair and I was just all… ‘Nope.’” He threw his hands up in the air in surrender.

It was too fucking charming. Here Eliot was, terrified of what the next five, ten, fifteen minutes would look like, and Q had just as much going on in his head. So much that he couldn’t be bothered with what was and was not a chair, and Eliot completely forgot he was telekinetic with all this stuff in his arms. The fact that neither of them were drunk or high right now and they were still acting like this… Man, they had to talk. Probably to, like, five therapists. But at least to each other, if nothing else.

“Yeah, ‘nope’ about covers it,” Eliot said. He crossed the carpet and set the large metal bowl on the side table between the chairs, freeing one hand. With it, he bent and placed the smaller bowls on the ground, and plopped his ass down next to Q’s feet, his back to the flames and their legs parallel. No side by side conversations. No turning too far away. At least he wasn’t putting his feet to the fire.

“You’ll let me make it up to you one day, won’t you?” Quentin abruptly asked. Before Eliot could even take in a breath to rebuke that, he overrode him. “I know I don’t have to. I know you’re gonna…insist I don’t have to. Or you’ll try to convince me I don’t, with something very persuasive, but – ”

“Because I am persuasive.” Eliot tried to make his tone light, but he was worried about that line of thinking. That was what’d started him on the path to getting Q back to…

Back to what? Who he was?

Who was Q, after Eliot shot that gun, taking his ‘sacrifice’ away from him? Who was Q, when something else was running around in Eliot’s body? On top of that, neither of them were the two old men who’d assembled an entire life around 784 tiles.

No. Wait.

Weren’t they?

He flexed his fingers. They were still very warm from the dessert he’d been holding.

They were. They were those people. Had never stopped being those people. And more. Or, at least, could be more. If they both wanted to be. He brought the cold bowl down from the table, and used a spoon to grab a dollop of its contents. “And I’m gonna start my convincing with some hand-whipped cream.”

Q sighed, his face crumpling. Eliot watched him push his resignation away, and his own determination only grew.

_No more of that, Q. Not tonight._

He thought about using his Discipline again. But he really wanted to do this the other way. “I’m gonna put my left hand on your chin,” he said, very quietly.

Q took a deep, shaky breath. Gave his permission with a nod. So Eliot tilted Q’s chin, and guided the spoon to his lips with his own hands. Eliot took a haggard breath of his own as he felt him lower his jaw and wrap his lips around the cream. With a sigh, Quentin moved the smooth topping around in his mouth.

“And,” Eliot continued, “to make things easier, I’ll admit I’ve been a little selfish.” He loved that protesting, disbelieving frown that popped up on Q’s face through the blindfold after he said this. He used his thumb to trace a line across his jaw, a distraction from saying anything. As he gave him another taste, he confessed, “Like I said, tonight’s meal gave me an excuse to see you. I shut the lights off all the time whenever you walk in the room. ‘Cause we don’t wanna hurt your eyes. We’ve…lived in the dark for months. All I get is your outline, your shape, every day. Do you,” and here he gave a single, quiet laugh, “do you know how expressive your face is? How much I _enjoy_ seeing you make a face at everything?”

Q didn’t answer. He was so tense, like words were going to come bursting out of him any second.

“I’ve really missed it. I got to see so much of you, just in this past hour alone,” Eliot said. “So thank you.”

He gave him another small portion. As he pulled away, Q reached up and grabbed his hand. Eliot held his arm still as Q swallowed the cream quickly and prepared to speak. But then he stopped, his mouth half open, and he twitched his fingers along the skin in between Eliot’s thumb and pointer finger.

“What is it?”

Q blinked several times, the fire casting shadows around him. “Sorry. It’s just. I get surprised sometimes.”

“What’d I do?”

Letting out a long breath, Q turned his head away a little. He didn’t want to say this.

“Please tell me.”

His voice cracked. “It was our third ladder, I think. It was still new, and it broke for some reason. We didn’t know if the wood was rotten, or the rope was bad. But you were sitting right on top and went…crashing to the ground.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Eliot soothed, not sure where this was going.

Nodding, Q ran his finger along the same spot on Eliot’s hand again. “No, yeah, you were fine. You had this scar, though. Right here. From a big splinter we pulled out. Every time I took your hand, I’d feel it. For decades. I got so used to how your hand felt. I hold your hand sometimes now, and it’s not there.” He hung his head, the scarlet of the blindfold flashing in the firelight. Almost like a splash of paint across his eyes. Like he was guilty of something. “Some days, I forget it’s not there. But every once in a while I go ‘why’s his hand different,’ before I get my memory straight. And it’s never gonna be there again. And I wonder how long it’ll be before I forget it was ever there.” Shaking his head, he looked back up, at the space where he thought Eliot’s head was, and let him go. “It’s a surprise every time, all those feelings at once. That’s all.”

Eliot wanted to take him in his arms. He couldn’t do a single thing to fix any of that.

Looking down, he saw the two bowls. With the spoon, he scooped up the cream again, and then dipped it into the dessert. His heart was thundering, in his chest, in his ears. He blew on it, one last consideration for how it would be accepted. His left hand fell away.

Q ate the mouthful. And whimpered when he tasted it. He blinked rapidly, chewed, like he could do nothing else, and made another sound, almost as if he was wounded.

“Peach crumble,” Eliot said, even though that was obvious by now. He barely breathed. He saw Quentin swallow. The success of him being able to eat it was only a blip on his radar. “I haven’t eaten a…since…and I haven’t even touched one since…” His throat was closing up. Sweat broke out on his back. He didn’t mean for the words to come out like an apology, but they almost did.

The blindfold was having a hard time keeping up with all of Q’s expressions. His bottom lip started to wobble, and his forehead crumpled inwards. “It’s…it’s r-really good.” The sides of his mouth spasmed, like he was grinning and about to start weeping at the same time.

“Should I not…have – ”

“Keep it coming.” Q pushed himself forward.

Eliot wavered. He ladled more of the cream on top of the peaches and relinquished the bowl onto Quentin’s lap. The slices of fruit were just long enough to fit on the large spoons. He deserved to do this himself. But Quentin pushed it back.

“It’s the best surprise of the night,” he whispered.

The best surprise of the night was actually supposed to come right after. Eliot’d argued this to Margo, and his brain oh so helpfully thought it again now: he’d never, ever, had success with big, romantic declarations of love. He had no blueprint; no checklist of ‘what to say to get the guy.’ All the ones in movies were hetero as shit and were _fictional_ , so it’s not like he could, or even should, get inspiration from them, because Q deserved originality. And Eliot’s own past attempts – which he could count on one hand – were all flat-out rejections. He had far more experience doing the rejecting.

He didn’t _do_ speeches anyway. He did natural chemistry, and gestures, and I’ll-let-you-see-part-of-the-real-me-if-you-promise-not-to-break-me’s. And where the fuck was his prepared speech now? Fuck. How the fuck was it supposed to go? The poetic sentences and the begging explanations he’d come up with rang hollow. Q was the one who did speeches. Q relied on words, like they were somehow, impossibly, some of the strongest, most dependable things on the planet. Instead of what everyone used to over- or underexaggerate real life. Or outright lie about it. Like when you lie and say committing to a relationship with someone you love, again, isn’t something you would do, if given the choice.

But how else, besides words, was Q going to believe him now? Q, who had so many words he tripped over them as they came spilling out in a beautiful, messy torrent.

_Time to fucking spill, Eliot._

“I like surprising you. In a good way, I mean,” Eliot said.

Q half-smiled. “It feels good to get them. And give ‘em. When someone, um, shows you they know you that well. And when you’re showing someone you know them. It feels really good.” His mouth creased, fighting the embarrassment of how he’d just said all that. Not to mention the stupid obviousness of it all.

Eliot’s mind, meanwhile, was trying to slam onto the brakes. He’d been interrupted, it was fine, he could stop now and just let the conversation – no, fuck no. He kept going. “I..I said ‘I know you,’ once,” Eliot blurted. “In the throne room. I…convinced you. With a lie that was…unbearably persuasive.”

_‘Cause nothing shows consideration like throwing the other person’s words from earlier right back in their face._

Q stiffened. “What?”

“I lied. That…that I’m not the man who’d want to spend another lifetime with you.”

Quentin jerked back. He bumped into the chair behind him. “You. Lied.”

Yeah, this wasn’t a good surprise. It wasn’t going to feel good. None of this was part of the nice speech he’d prepared. And it was appalling that he was doing this when Q was both completely blind, and completely vulnerable to all the memories the peaches resurrected. But he had to say it, had to give Q the power to break him now. Just as he’d been broken by Eliot’s fear back then.

“I lied to you, and I lied to myself about how we could, just, go on with the rest of the quest, with the rest of our lives. Like the mosaic was just…a thing that happened.”

A dark, wet spot blotted a small corner of the blindfold. Q hissed through clenched teeth.

Eliot’s face was burning up. He squeezed his eyes shut as they watered, as they overflowed. He took a gasping breath. “As if I could move on. Move on from having loved you for over fifty years and still _being_ in love with you on those steps, even though I made you think different. Pretending as if I _didn’t_ know you that well, even though I _knew_ just how much what I was saying would hurt you. I was so selfish, keeping you just close enough, and so scared that I thought I could push you just far away enough for us to survive. But we…you…didn’t.”

He was barely making any sense. His heart was going so fast, his entire chest was shrieking.

Quentin’s hands flailed out, and his right hit Eliot’s leg. He gathered the fabric into a rigid fist. “What you’ve been doing tonight. And, and every day, since I…since I came back. Has it been you trying to, to, to make up for that?”

“No!” Eliot gripped the bowl, his thumbs smearing with the crumble’s filling. “Well. In my unhealthy moments. My head tried to tell me that’s what I was doing. That that’s what I had to do. But no. That’d mean I was doing this as if what I _feel_ for you…can be, fucking, measured. Or has some kind of, fucking, quantifiable value, no matter whether I could make up for it or not.”

Quentin’s other hand stretched out. The dark spot on the blindfold was spreading, and a matching one was growing on his other cheek. Leaning forward, he found the edge of Eliot’s waistcoat, and pulled a little. “You were in love with me on those steps,” he said.

It took Eliot a second to realize he had to confirm it. “Yes.”

“And after that? After all the other keys, and Blackspire? And that day in the park?”

“Yes.” Eliot blinked his eyes open, the tears blurring everything he could see.

“And since I came back. It hasn’t just redeveloped. Or reappeared. Or happened because you felt like you owed it to me. It’s always been there.”

“Yes.”

Then Q yanked him forward, until Eliot was almost bent over entirely. Eliot’s hand slipped into the bowl, and peach filling spread onto the spot where Q missed his old scar.

“Show me,” Q begged.

An irrational part of his brain came up with something, and he just fucking went with it. He dropped the bowl to the floor, hoping it landed upright but not stopping to make sure. He raised his hand and licked the smear away, then pressed his lips to Quentin’s, sealing them together with the taste of peaches.

Their noses knocked into each other. Q grunted a little, readjusted, and then pulled him forward again even more, so much that Eliot had to plant his hand on the floor so he wouldn’t crash down onto Q’s knee. The muscles of his back protested, and the scar tissue in his side throbbed.

But they were kissing. Oh god. Oh fuck he hadn’t felt this in so fucking long. Q’s cheeks were on fire. So were his. Stubble, Q’s fantastic familiar stubble, scratched along his lip. He felt the tiny shock of his tears being wiped away by Q’s skin. He kissed the edge of his mouth, the little indent on his chin. And that hot as fuck blindfold was brushing along his own cheekbones every time he moved so much as a centimeter. Yearning clawed at his ribs, and he broke them apart for a split second. He pushed up to vault one of his legs over Q’s, planted himself on Quentin’s thighs, wrapped a hand on the side of his neck, and opened his lips to bury himself against his mouth again. His other hand snaked around his back and crashed their chests together.

He licked inside, his tongue curling around the current of peaches and cream, trying to get enough air through his nose as Q moaned and started to retaliate. He let him take over, tangle a hand through his curls, chase his tongue with his own.

“Do you know what this is like?” Quentin asked, pulling away to plant kisses across Eliot’s jaw.

Eliot shook his head, only able to withstand the separation for that long before he was pressing a kiss to Q’s scalp, his forehead, anything.

“I only get your shape too,” Quentin breathed, kissed, breathed, spoke into the skin of his jugular. “This towering, solid shadow in the dark.” He trailed a hand down Eliot’s tie, down to the buttons of his waistcoat, popping them open to drift his fingers along Eliot’s shirt beneath. “I haven’t seen your face at all. I’ve only been _feeling_ you, practically this whole time. Only get your touch when you guide me. Only get to – ” He kissed the skin behind his ear. “ – hear your voice, and all the words and sounds you make with it.”

Eliot shuddered, a groan escaping like it was punched out of him. He moved his hands to cup Q’s face, tilt it back, and capture that gorgeous mouth of his again. It was true. Eliot had the advantage here. Right now, he could see everything. Saw every moment of hunger crossing his face. Got to see every reaction when his hands stroked over his sides, clutched his sweatshirt, trailed over the skin of his collarbone, leaving goosebumps in their wake. And it was a fucking privilege. A gift he was going to shamelessly take advantage of.

Q broke away again, tilting his forehead up to lean against Eliot’s. “And the rustle of your clothes. I hear you moving all the time. You’re always so close.” Both of his hands started working on his tie, tugging it forward, loosening it to get it up and over his head and cast it aside. One by one, he undid the buttons of his shirt, and through gritted teeth, continued, “But you’re always so, so f– fuck. Fuck.”

Eliot was snatched back down to earth as Quentin pulled away, bending backwards, putting distance between them. He was tense. Too tense for…for good things to be happening. Shit. One of his senses might be – “You alright? What’s going on; what can I do?” he asked, almost falling over himself to get off his lap.

Immediately, Q clambered up into one of the green chairs, breathing hard. Cool, empty air flowed across Eliot’s exposed chest as he tried not to freak out about whether he’d caused this. The fire danced behind them silently. But then Q settled in his seat and his face broke out into a grin, “You’re always so _tall._ You were bending me in half down there. This’s better, c’mere.”

Oh, okay.

Oh.

Oh fuck.

Eliot’s pants were getting tight, much tighter than before. Because Quentin looked like a wild, borderline _royal_ , mess, and that chair was his humble throne, and Eliot was in the perfect position to…

Surprise him.

He shuffled over on his knees. Quentin leaned forward, but Eliot ducked down at the last minute to lave his tongue on his neck. A harsh gasp met his ears, and he smiled around another wet kiss as he unzipped that tantalizing zipper he’d ingeniously lowered earlier. All, all, all the way down now, and he parted the sweatshirt to graze feather-light touches over his hips. With a mere thought, he brought the bowl back over. Putting together a healthy spoonful, he pressed the utensil to Quentin’s lips.

Q smiled even wider as he ate, the peaches bathing his mouth in bliss. They’d created this recipe together, the rich mixture of the brown sugar and cinnamon lumped together and cascading over the fruit. Back then, they’d had Fillorian spices to work with instead of Earth ones, and now he could honestly say he couldn’t decide which one he liked better. Especially when Eliot misdirected the next bite – probably on purpose – and it grazed some cream and filling across his sternum on its way up. And he felt Eliot part his legs to get closer. Locks of his silky curls, followed by the fabric of his waistcoat and shirt, ghosted phantom touches across Quentin’s stomach as he licked the errant spread away. And then he did it again, running cool cream across Q’s pec and following it with his warm mouth, as he gave Q another bite. And again, dabbing above his nipple and sending a heated shock down to his dick as he closed his mouth over the nub. He kept at this terrible, wonderful teasing for a short eternity, always finding a new place to worship and feeding him peaches at the same time.

He was getting so hard. He’d swear on a stack of Fillory books Eliot could feel him pressing against his stomach every time he bent his head down. It was impossible to say who was enjoying this more. On the one hand, he could sit and take everything Eliot was giving him for hours. Days even; spent in this fantastic, heady, hot darkness. But, on the other hand, “El... _El_.”

A chuckling breath of air tumbled across his belly, and he heard Eliot whisper, “Tell me.”

“Your, your mouth. Please. I want…”

Foolishly, he’d hoped that was all he needed to say. But Eliot didn’t move.

“I want y-your mouth. On my. On my cock.”

Eliot placed the bowl back on the ground, and slipped his fingers into the waistband of his pants. It’d been tempting fate – and himself - to dress Q in these, and now it was all he could do to give in. He dragged them down, and his boxers too, grazing the cheeks of Quentin’s ass and sliding everything off entirely. He saw Quentin flush again as he took gulps of air into his lungs. But he didn’t take him into his mouth right away. Because after a good, long moment…came that delicious realization he’d been hoping for: it crossed Q’s mind that Eliot was just _staring_. Letting him sit there. Bare. On display, just for him. The firelight was flickering shadows across Q’s hard length, and he saw the muscles of his thighs and ass shift as the anticipation in the air settled over them.

Eliot leaned in. He exhaled just above the head, and Q jerked his hips, a small noise bursting from his throat. One of his hands slowly wrapped around the base, caressing it with small flexes of his fingers, which earned him another lovely open-mouthed expression.

Screw it. He was out of practice, but should that make him hesitate any longer? Fuck no. Not when he could scatter sparks up Quentin’s spine. Get him to make noises Eliot hadn’t heard in years.

Wetting his lips, he closed them around his cock, leaving his mouth there for just long enough for Q to feel it, to coat the tip, before sliding right back off again. The bitterness was a sharp contrast to the sweet. “I want to hear you,” Eliot said. Removing his hand, he used it to caress a line up his belly, then back down to his thigh to brace himself. He ducked to press his tongue between his shaft and his balls, gliding a smooth trail all the way up. Down. Up. And finally taking him in as deep as he could.

“Ahhh,” Quentin keened. Eliot hadn’t opened his mouth wide enough, and had grazed him with his teeth for a second. Didn’t matter if it was an accident or on purpose. It was so _good_. Everything else flew right out of his head. There was just his body, covered only in an open sweatshirt and parts of Eliot, and his brain zeroed in on every ounce of sensory input it could. Little brushes, from the velvet fibers of the chair every time he shifted. The way that Eliot’s hand bent the hairs on his thigh as he balanced himself, the cuffs of his shirt brushing his skin. The product in Eliot’s hair, wafts of gel with hints of a musky scent. The slick sounds of Eliot’s lips and spit around him, as he hollowed his cheeks. That amazing mouth, whose every little movement tightened the coil winding inside him, burning a fire through his insides. He wanted to fill in this picture so badly. “What – mmmhhh – what color’s’re your clothes?”

Eliot pushed him farther into his mouth, and Quentin moaned again. He wasn’t at the back of his throat, not yet, but fucking hell he was almost there. A few more bobs of his head, and Quentin started to suspect he wasn’t going to answer him, until Eliot pulled off with a heavy groan.

“Eggshell-white dress shirt,” he answered, catching his breath, “with tiny. Tiny black circles. All over it, so you nearly lose the white.” He snuck a kiss onto Quentin’s knee, running his fingers through the hair on his thigh. “You chucked away my very shiny, sapphire, satin tie.”

“And what’s your vest –”

“Waistcoat, Q.”

“Who gi– ”

“I do,” Eliot chided in a low voice, taking his hand away. “I gave you a long, long lesson on the difference once.”

That memory seemed to brush over them at the exact same time. A drop of precum appeared on the slit of Q’s red, wet dick, and Eliot’s hips gave a small, reflexive thrust. It’d take only a second to pull himself out, to relieve some of the pressure he’d been deliciously forcing himself to ignore.

Quentin clenched his hands on the arms of the chair. “What’s the color of your fucking _waistcoat_ , El?”

Eliot returned to lightly touching his leg. Repositioned himself to nuzzle over him again. Followed a vein, and, in between kisses, said, “The same color as my pants.”

And Q surprised him, dropping a hand over the one on his thigh. He squeezed, hard. “Which _is_?”

“Ocean blue.” And he swallowed Q all the way down, so his nose brushed his belly. He gagged just a little, but it was worth it as his ears were met with a ragged cry. The hand over his tightened even more as Q threaded their fingers together, just to stop his hips from pitching forward.

 _But that’s exactly what I want_.

He took his other hand, wrapped it around the mound of his ass, and pushed. All of the muscles beneath him contracted, and Quentin let himself thrust straight into Eliot’s mouth. He slackened his jaw, letting his own body relax as much as possible, and moaned in encouragement, more precum stirring on his tongue. And with that, self-control was no longer a part of their vocabulary.

Quentin moved his other hand to the back of Eliot’s head, and began to fuck inside rough and fast. He nearly let his head fell back, nearly surrendered to this primal thing inside telling him to _use_. The sound of it rang hot and filthy all around him, and more than once he felt his balls graze Eliot’s chin. Cravings for _more_ , _faster_ , _harder_ , built on the edge of his mind, and started to override every other thought. Until Eliot’s breath tickled against him.

“W-w-wait,” he panted, stilling his hips. “Wait.”

And Eliot was the one whimpering with need now. Quentin tugged the wave that was cresting inside him back. Resisted falling over the edge, with the small blip of awareness he had left.

His imagination tried to pull him in again. It taunted him with the image of Eliot on his knees, the almost spent look in his wide hazel eyes, the rise and fall of his sweating chest, whose little black hairs would be just visible beneath the open halves of his wrinkled clothes.

But the light would be behind him, casting him into shadow. A dark shape again. And Quentin wasn’t about to come with _that_ in his head.

His head.

God. Was he really going to try this? Fuck yes. He had to. If Eliot could put his entire heart on the line, meeting Quentin in his darkness, as he always tried to…then why not risk the worst, if there was the chance at having the best. He detached his hand from Eliot’s, gently cupping his jaw and guiding him away from his straining cock.

“You okay?” Eliot managed.

God. This man. That voice, almost a growl, all desire, barely any restraint. And the first thing he did with it when he got his breath back was to put _him_ first.

Quentin lifted his hands away, and shrugged out of his sweatshirt. There was a ruffling sound in front of him, and the side of Eliot’s knee nudged against his foot. Was he backing up? “St-stay there,” he said softly.

This probably wasn’t going to work. He had a good chance of just falling flat on his face. But his imagination had supplied something new and _good_. And yeah, it was risking another sensory setback, a huge one. But he could make it happen. He could, if he just…landed it right. There were times where actions said much, much more than any of his usual bumbling words, and this was one of them.

He leaned closer, reaching out. Eliot’s hands wrapped around his forearms in support. Q felt them twitch and spasm a little, nerves still coursing through his limbs no matter how much Eliot tried to keep himself still. Before Eliot could brace for anything, Quentin leaned far forward and let himself fall out of the chair towards the floor. Like he’d hoped, Eliot haphazardly caught him, and he wound up a bit awkwardly pinned to his lap.

“What’s – ”

He giggled a little in relief, and also to assure him he was alright. The carpet rubbed on his bare knees, and the warmth of Eliot’s solid chest seeped in.

This, this closeness, was what they needed. Taking a slow, deep breath, and then another…and another…and another, he felt something rise out of them, like smoke they’d been holding in their lungs for too long. His erection lost some of its intensity, and Eliot’s wasn’t far behind. Lust wasn’t going to swallow them whole for this, not entirely. They could connect more than that.

“I want you.”

“You too,” Eliot murmured into his hair, breathing hard and wrapping his arms around him.

He found the button of Eliot’s pants, undid it, and pulled his zipper down, to the sound of Eliot hissing in relief. Drifting his hands away, he drew up from his lap to kneel beside him. Into his ear, he whispered, “Turn around?”

Eliot swallowed. “What’re you…”

Quentin, trying to project a confidence he’d only felt with Eliot (and only after several, _several_ years of getting it wrong), grazed his knuckles through the little hairs on his chest. He stroked a touch down the stuttering muscles of his abdomen. “I’m gonna make you feel so good, El. Turn around.” He kept his hand in place, so he could feel the turn of his body, and so Eliot didn’t lose the contact they shared.

Once he was facing the fire, Quentin wrapped his hands around him. He pressed chaste kisses to the top of his neck and made his way down to his shoulder. A shiver went through Eliot. Like an electric current, it raced down Quentin’s spine too. He pulled his shirt and waistcoat off in one easy glide, pressing another kiss to Eliot’s lower back. As he rose back up, he said, “You’ll need to take those _ocean blue_ pants off for this.”

A sudden, breathless laugh rushed out, shaking the two of them. “You want my _tall_ , gangly self to fall right on my ass?”

He smiled into the skin of Eliot’s shoulder. It was gonna be awkward, no denying. That was one of their minor miracles. The awkward, in the end, never ruined anything. “I’m sure you’ll make it work. Tell me when you’re done.” He backed up a little, curling his hands into fists to stop them from wandering anywhere else. He was half-hard by this point, and very easily, deviously, could tease both of them with just a few strokes. But he wasn’t going to. There was a plan.

“All set,” Eliot huffed a moment later.

Quentin uncurled his hands. Extending his arm, he hit Eliot’s bare thigh. Oh fuck. This wasn’t some hope-soaked fantasy he’d stored away in the deepest parts of his heart. They were _here_. Really doing this.

He copied Eliot’s move from before, settling down on his lap. And the second their cocks touched, they both moaned like they’d had the wind knocked from their bodies. Using his hand to guide the way, he found Eliot’s chin again, and went in for another kiss. Languid, but craving, like Eliot was what his lungs needed, what his brain and heart and soul needed.

“I want,” he gathered as much actual air back in as he could, “I want you inside me.”

“MMmm, Q –”

He shook his head, dragging the blindfold back and forth, their noses brushing together again. “If you think I’m going to pry myself off you, so we can climb all those stairs, just to get to a bed,” he said, his mouth twisting into a wry grin as he kissed him one more time. “After every moment you spent teasing me. Which came after. Every. Delicious. Thing. You put in my mouth…”

Eliot’s brain was this close to filling up with white noise. He saw Q reach behind himself, teasing his entrance without so much as a tut to get them some lube.

“I’m – m’not. Gonna last long,” he warned, tracing a spell on Quentin’s ass.

Quentin lost all the air he’d just got back as the magic worked him open. It’d been far, far too long. An emptiness – _that_ kind of emptiness, that _need_ to be filled, which he’d shoved down or batted away or beat himself up so many times for wanting, because he’d thought it wasn’t returned – was taking him over. And he didn’t have to hold it back any more. He wanted to cry, wanted to crow for happiness, wanted to make so many wrecked noises, all for Eliot.

“Me too,” he choked out, rising up on his knees. “Hurry.”

Eliot took himself in hand, unable to see what he was doing but encouraged by all the little sounds Q made as he guided himself closer. Finally, he felt the rim of his slick, ready hole, and tilted the head just inside. Q moaned so loud, right in his ear, as he let himself sink back down, inch by fucking beautiful inch. Eliot pressed his eyes shut, trying not to come right then and there, haunted by the look on Quentin’s face. Then Q was fully seated, his ass cradled by Eliot’s hips. The world fell away. There was only the tight, hot clench of Quentin on his cock. The only thing Eliot wanted more than staying just like this, forever, was to _move_. He had so little leverage. He had to think of something. Maybe if he leaned back on one hand.

He opened his eyes.

While he’d had them closed, Q’d taken the blindfold off.

Eliot almost had a heart attack.

Quentin’s eyelids fluttered. He squeezed them tighter, the crow’s feet drawing sharp lines around his eyes. He cracked one open in the smallest of squints. Eliot couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything, His brain was screaming at him to stop him, protect him, but that was drowned out by the irresistible: Q opening his eyes.

A hundred blinks. A dozen contractions and dilations, of his stunning, warm brown irises. He saw the exact second everything came into focus.

And Quentin, in turn, saw Eliot’s black, matted hair, wisps of it stuck to his forehead by sweat, not as short as he thought it would be. And he saw new wrinkles on his forehead, and how his ears stuck out a little bit more than he remembered, and how the edges of his sideburns faded out just slightly off kilter from each other. He had a proper, dark, closely cropped beard now, which explained why his own face felt a good, sharp sting all over. And that little mole was still there, just beneath his cheekbone. His skin was a fantastic, flushed pink, and his lips were even darker, open halfway to take in desperate gasps of air.

Their eyes met. Quentin saw the awe and love dawn on Eliot’s face, growing and glowing and shining it all on him. Eliot leaned back, bracing himself, and thrust up, never breaking eye contact. FUCK, that was so fucking good. They both nearly closed their eyes, but managed to keep them open. Neither of them was going to miss a single moment. He angled his hips a bit, and sank down as Eliot moved again.

A little out of sync, but. Good. Amazing. The next one, oh, the stretch. The pressure. Quentin placed one hand on Eliot’s shoulder, the other on the back of his neck. Where it always belonged. They matched their movements. Achingly slow, taking all the time in the world. Quentin was so full. Eliot was so gone. When he hit Quentin’s prostate, he shouted. Though he couldn’t get it every time, it was the look on Eliot’s face after Quentin recovered. That’s what did it. That wave inside his mind rose up again, fast. Every movement, he mirrored. He brought their lips inches apart, meaning to kiss him, but an erratic thrust shorted out almost all his circuits.

“Are. You.”

“You first,” Eliot gasped.

Putting Eliot first, by putting himself first. Quentin took his hand off his shoulder. The one on his neck still anchored him in place. He took his cock, still slick with spit, and jerked himself in time with Eliot’s thrusts. Eliot’s exquisite face, all of its little changes, the tension building up as he held himself back just a little, and his impossibly tender eyes, filled every inch of his vision. He came, the wave inside finally cresting, crashing down, blanketing his brain, as ropes of cum spurted between their bodies.

A soaring lurch pierced through him. Eliot had dropped straight to the ground, Quentin collapsing, boneless, on his chest. He lay there, the sound of their hearts thundering in his ears, cum sliding on one of his nipples, as Eliot grasped his hips with both hands, and fucked up into him, rough and without rhythm. His fingers pressed a bruising grip into the cheeks of his ass, spreading him open even further. Quentin’s sensitive cock was trapped between them. He was still so full, every single one of his senses just _Eliot, Eliot, Eliot._ And then Eliot was coming too, jerking once, twice, three times, and a deep warmth spread inside him.

They lay panting there, spent, holding each other for as long as they could. They outright whined, almost at the same time, when Eliot pulled out a couple of minutes later. Quentin tried to do his part, tried to cast a spell to clean them both up, but his fingers were out of practice.

Before he could ask for help, Eliot asked, in between pants, “How’d you know that’d work?”

 _The sex?_ he thought for one stupid, hazy second. And then he realized he probably meant the blindfold. He made a weird, embarrassed chuckle in the back of his throat. “Kinda didn’t.”

“Motherfucker,” Eliot whispered. And then laughed along with him.

Quentin pressed an understanding, slightly apologetic kiss to Eliot’s chest, the little hairs scratching his cheek. “I didn’t look right at the light. Just at what it was showing me. You.”

Eliot was apparently able to read between the lines on that one. He murmured, “You know how corny that is, don’t you?”

“Mmm. ‘S true though,” he replied. He tried the spell again, and must’ve gotten the finger positions right, since he felt the drag of magic cleaning them off. Eliot ran his fingers down his spine in thanks, spirals and swirls, making him shiver. “Like you wouldn’t’ve wanted the first thing you saw to be me, if it was the other way around?”

Eliot groaned, but he didn’t deny it. He even pressed a kiss to the top of his head, too. “If it was the other way around, I don’t think we’d’ve made it over here. I don’t know how I kept my hands to myself in the kitchen.”

“’Cause it was all a show, and you wanted to make it perfect,” Q said.

Eliot shifted. “It wasn’t all perfect.”

Quentin shrugged. He ran a finger over the curve of Eliot’s shoulder. “Who knows why. It’s probably gonna be a hit or a miss on everything I eat for a while. And…my eyes aren’t all better either. Don’t think I’m gonna see sunlight for a long time.”

Eliot sat up, holding himself up on his elbows and staring down at him thoughtfully. Quentin turned his head and looked – fucking _looked, thank fuck_ – right back, putting a hand under his chin to support himself. They both took a second to memorize this moment, eyes darting over every feature.

“When you are back at a hundred percent,” Eliot asked quietly, “what d’you want to do?”

“So you can plan something awesome?” Quentin smiled. He reached his spare arm over, around the discarded blindfold, and snagged the untouched peach crumble on his left. Straining, he managed to get a peach on the spoon, and held it up to Eliot. Eliot’s eyebrow rose, but he indulged him. As he ate it, Quentin had the chance to see all of Eliot’s reactions. That was never going to get old. “Not sure. There’s a lot of things. Maybe go explore Fillory a bit more? Like really, really explore it?”

Swallowing, Eliot’s other eyebrow joined the first one. “The great…outdoors?” he drawled. “Hiking, and camping? Purposefully forgoing what few luxuries Fillory actually has to offer?”

Quentin didn’t answer at first. He used the spoon to drag the bowl closer to them, and he made Eliot another bite. While he chewed, Quentin admitted, “We never really got the chance to, like, enjoy it? I mean, I’m not saying we, you know, go white water rafting down the Burnt River. But we could take the _Muntjac_ up the Silver Banks, and figure out why The Chankly Bore’s called that. Or go the other way ‘n vacation in Sutton for a while, with Margo and Julia. Cross the Rainbow Bridge, see where you got crowned again.” He fed himself a peach this time, fortifying himself for the next words. “I’d like to see if we can find, um, our. Our, uh. Our old place. Visit for a day or two. Or find. Find Teddy’s. Or any of the, the others.”

Eliot reached out, and took his hand, squeezing until it hurt. He nodded.

But Q wasn’t done. “And, and then, then we keep going. In Fillory, or here, or somewhere else. Find new places. Make…make our own place somewhere, one day.”

Eliot blinked rapidly. His eyes took on a glassy, wet look. He sat up all the way, inching Quentin off of his chest, until they situated themselves and sat facing each other. “You…you want me to plan that far ahead?” he asked.

“I do,” Quentin said.

The fire flickered again, maybe a blast of air from the heating, making their surroundings grow just a little brighter. Quentin could still smell the aromas from dinner. Felt the warmth from the fire at his back. Heard the air inhaled through Eliot’s nose as he leaned forward and kissed him. Tasted sweetness and spices on his tongue. Saw Eliot, as he pulled away, try not to cry, and fail, the tears dribbling down his cheek. And he saw him smile so big, so wide, so happily, that Quentin knew he would remember this moment for the rest of his life. And he had _such_ a life to live. With Eliot. He was ready for it. He was looking forward to it so much, he could hardly stand it. He had their past to anchor him. He had their present to guide him. And he could see their future. More clearly than he ever thought he would.


End file.
